How do I get the current username in Windows PowerShell

Question

User · Answer

I have used  env username in the past  but a colleague pointed out it s an environment variable and can be changed by the user and therefore  if you really want to get the current user s username  you shouldn t trust it   I d upvote Mark Seemann s answer       System Security Principal WindowsIdentity   GetCurrent   Name  But I m not allowed to  With Mark s answer  if you need just the username  you may have to parse it out since on my system  it returns hostname username and on domain joined machines with domain accounts it will return domain username   I would not use whoami exe since it s not present on all versions of Windows  and it s a call out to another binary and may give some security teams fits

User · Answer

I thought it would be valuable to summarize and compare the given answers   If you want to access the environment variable    easier shorter memorable option     Environment   UserName --  ThomasBratt  env username --  Eoin whoami --  galaktor     If you want to access the Windows access token    more dependable option     System Security Principal WindowsIdentity   GetCurrent   Name --  MarkSeemann     If you want the name of the logged in user   rather than the name of the user running the PowerShell instance      Get-WMIObject -class Win32 ComputerSystem   select username  username --  TwonOfAn on this other forum     Comparison   Kevin Panko s comment on  Mark Seemann s answer deals with choosing one of the categories over the other       The Windows access token approach  is the most secure answer  because  env USERNAME can be altered by the user  but this will not be fooled by doing that    In short  the environment variable option is more succinct  and the Windows access token option is more dependable   I ve had to use  Mark Seemann s Windows access token approach in a PowerShell script that I was running from a C  application with impersonation   The C  application is run with my user account  and it runs the PowerShell script as a service account  Because of a limitation of the way I m running the PowerShell script from C   the PowerShell instance uses my user account s environment variables  even though it is run as the service account user   In this setup  the environment variable options return my account name  and the Windows access token option returns the service account name  which is what I wanted   and the logged in user option returns my account name     Testing  Also  if you want to compare the options yourself  here is a script you can use to run a script as another user  You need to use the Get-Credential cmdlet to get a credential object  and then run this script with the script to run as another user as argument 1  and the credential object as argument 2   Usage    cred   Get-Credential UserTo RunAs Run-AsUser ps1  whoami  pause   cred Run-AsUser ps1   System Security Principal WindowsIdentity   GetCurrent   Name  pause   cred   Contents of Run-AsUser ps1 script   param     Parameter Mandatory  true      string  script     Parameter Mandatory  true      System Management Automation PsCredential  cred    Start-Process -Credential  cred -FilePath  powershell exe  -ArgumentList  noprofile   -Command    script

User · Answer

username     Get-WMIObject -class Win32 ComputerSystem   Select-Object -ExpandProperty username   -split        1     username  The second username is for display only purposes only if you copy and paste it

User · Answer

I find easiest to use  cd  home Desktop   will take you to current user desktop  In my case  I needed to retrieve the username to enable the script to change the path  ie  c  users  username   I needed to start the script by changing the path to the users desktop  I was able to do this  with help from above and elsewhere  by using the get-location applet   You may have another  or even better way to do it  but this worked for me    Path   Get-Location  Set-Location  Path Desktop

User · Answer

I found it    env UserName   There is also    env UserDomain  env ComputerName

User · Answer

If you re used to batch  you can call   user   cmd exe  c echo  username     This basically steals the output from what you would get if you had a batch file with just  echo  username

User · Answer

Environment   UserName returns just the user name  E g  bob  System Security Principal WindowsIdentity   GetCurrent   Name returns the user name  prefixed by its domain where appropriate  E g  SOMEWHERENICE bob

User · Answer

In my case  I needed to retrieve the username to enable the script to change the path  ie  c  users  username     I needed to start the script by changing the path to the users desktop  I was able to do this  with help from above and elsewhere  by using the get-location applet   You may have another  or even better way to do it  but this worked for me    Path   Get-Location  Set-Location  Path Desktop

User · Answer

env username is the easiest way

User · Answer

Just building on the work of others here    String    stUserDomain   String     stUserAccount     System Security Principal WindowsIdentity   GetCurrent   Name split

User · Answer

Now that PowerShell Core  aka v6  has been released  and people may want to write cross-platform scripts  many of the answers here will not work on anything other than Windows    Environment   UserName appears to be the best way of getting the current username on all platforms supported by PowerShell Core if you don t want to add platform detection and special casing to your code

User · Answer

I didn t see any Add-Type based examples  Here is one using the GetUserName directly from advapi32 dll    sig       DllImport  advapi32 dll   SetLastError   true   public static extern bool GetUserName System Text StringBuilder sb  ref Int32 length       Add-Type -MemberDefinition  sig -Namespace Advapi32 -Name Util   size   64  str   New-Object System Text StringBuilder -ArgumentList  size   Advapi32 util   GetUserName  str   ref  size   Out-Null  str ToString

User · Answer

I d like to throw in the whoami command  which basically is a nice alias for doing  USERDOMAIN   USERNAME  as proposed in other answers   Write-Host  current user   Write-Host   whoami

User · Answer

System Security Principal WindowsIdentity   GetCurrent   Name

[windows] How do I get the current username in Windows PowerShell?

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